


Something Left to Save

by sparxwrites



Series: Something Left To Save [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Food Deprivation, Fuck Or Die, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Masochism, Mentioned Beau/Jester, Mind Control, Panic Attacks, Past Astrid/Caleb Widogast, Psychological Torture, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self-Harm, Sexual Assault, Sleep Deprivation, Suicidal Thoughts, Vomiting, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:07:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22683712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: “It is a… command spell,” says Caleb, quietly, once Eodwulf has left their tiny cell, the few square metres that have been his and Beauregard’s whole world for over a week now. His head throbs. There’s blood on his upper lip, smeared and drying where he clumsily tried and failed to wipe it away. “It will– hurt us. Until we obey. Only once a day, but… it will not be, ah. Pleasant.”(In which Eodwulf is charged with breaking Caleb and Beau, and goes about his task with a particularly vile kind of creativity.)
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett/Caleb Widogast
Series: Something Left To Save [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2026676
Comments: 34
Kudos: 171





	Something Left to Save

**Author's Note:**

> Absolutely no one wanted this, other than [two people on the CR kinkmeme](https://criticalkink.dreamwidth.org/3194.html?thread=1287546), who asked for Beau and Caleb in a fuck-or-die situation. And apparently me, I guess – because I haven’t been able to get this prompt out of my head since reading it. In case you somehow missed the tags, **this is a horror story** , not a smutfic. Everything about this is awful, neither of them want this, and absolutely no one is having a good time here. ~~Other than maybe Eodwulf, but he deserves a slow and painful death, so. Y’know.~~
> 
> The title is from “[Smells Like Teen Spirit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4VfaxeYOt8)” by Cinematic Pop, a delightfully foreboding and miserable cover of the original.

“It is a… command spell,” says Caleb, quietly, once Eodwulf has left their tiny cell, the few square metres that have been his and Beauregard’s whole world for over a week now. His head throbs. There’s blood on his upper lip, smeared and drying where he clumsily tried and failed to wipe it away.

Beau doesn’t look much better than him. Her hair hangs lank around her face. There’s circles under her bloodshot eyes, dark purple and puffy. At least the space beneath her nose is clean, though, one sleeve of her cobalt-blue robes blotted black with blood.

“Don’t feel very fuckin’ commanded,” she mutters, eyeing Caleb where he’s tucked himself into the corner, curled up small with his knees to his chest and his arms around them. The only light in the room comes from the cuffs on his wrists, the runes carved into them glowing a faint bluish-green. “I’ve not got a sudden urge to. To–” She cuts herself off, swallows hard. “Fuckin’ _pervert_. Freak. I bet he’s getting off on this.”

She glares at the door, as though Eodwulf’s still listening on the other side. As though looks could kill through two inches of solid iron.

“It is not a _control_ spell,” corrects Caleb. He closes his eyes, rests his forehead on his knees, muffles his voice in the cavity formed from his own body between leg and chest – and does not argue with Beau about Eodwulf’s personal investment in this. “It will not force us. It will just– hurt us. Until we obey. Only once a day, but… it will not be, ah. Pleasant.”

Beau shrugs, with far more more confidence Caleb feels. The spell settling into his skull had felt like a hammer-blow to the brain, leaving him bruised and pulpy from the inside out. Even now, minutes later, he still feels– fragile. Tender.

“We can take it,” she says, casually, almost carelessly. As though she knows what she’s doing. “Easy. We just gotta make sure to sleep it off, in between. Problem solved, no sex required.”

In his corner, Caleb murmurs his assent, a soft and doubtful noise against his knees.

She is not wrong, he knows. If they sleep, they will be fine. They have taken both taken far worse than the brunt of a psychic curse. But– she has not done this before. Not done interrogation, long and slow and inventively cruel, with Trent, or one of Trent’s pupils. Not with _anyone_.

He _has_ , though. Many, many times before. And he doubts, somehow, it will be that simple.

* * *

It is _not_ that simple. Of course it isn’t. Eodwulf has been assigned to break them, Caleb knows, not simply inconvenience them with a daily headache.

The major flaw in Beau’s plan, he realises, when they are woken in the middle of the night, is that they must _sleep_. The hammering on their door rings in the hollow, cold space of their cell like the tolling of a bell, painfully loud. It is barely two hours into their night’s rest, and Caleb knows. He _knows_.

“Shut the fuck up!” yells Beau, blearily, from her awkward sprawl across the cold stone. “I’m trying to fucking _sleep_ here, dickhead! Gods. Can’t even get a decent fucking night’s rest when you’re being _illegally imprisoned_ by _creepy wizard perverts_ , huh?!”

Her sash is pillowed under her head, eyes only half-open, and Caleb can almost pretend they’re camping somewhere. That they’re in a dome he’s conjured, that the noise is Nott and Jester causing a menace on watch, that if looks to his side he will see Fjord, and Yasha, and–

“Beau,” he rasps, quietly. Her eyes meet his in the dark, finding his face only because it is lit gaunt and deathly by the glow of the manacles keeping his magic caged. “Beauregard. They are not going to let us sleep.”

“ _Urgh_ ,” she groans, as she registers his words. It takes her a moment, though, longer to register what they _mean_. “Oh. Oh, _fuck_.”

* * *

They are allowed to sleep in snatches – a hour here, two hours there. It’s enough to keep them from the madness that comes with too long spent awake, enough to stave off the visions and delusions and sickness.

Not enough, though, to ease the bruising to the soft tissues of their brains before the curse next takes its fill.

* * *

On the third day of the geas, Caleb’s nose starts bleeding and refuses to stop, a wet spill of brackish blood down his lips and chest. The shock of it leaves him pale and swaying. He brings a hand up to his face, to try and stem the tide, and only succeeds in soaking his skin in crimson too. It gets into the cracks of his knuckles, under his fingernails, and refuses to come out when he scrubs them with his ruined shirt.

Beau, though. Beau’s eyes roll back into her head, and the tension goes from her spine, and she slumps to the floor as though in sleep.

For thirty heart-stopping seconds, she doesn’t breathe.

Caleb scrambles over to her, slowly coagulating blood forgotten, and reaches her just as her eyes snap open once more. Her chest heaves. She lashes out on reflex, bloodshot and blackened eyes wild with pain and fear, at the figure looming over her.

The blow barely clips Caleb’s ear. It’s _nothing_ , not in comparison to the now-constant, brutal pounding in his head. It’s still enough to make him recoil. Enough to send him scrambling back to his corner, back to the wall and knees to his chest. It’s a poor attempt to give her some space, but it’s as much as he can manage in the closeness of their prison.

Beau pushes herself up on arms that shake, heavy exhaustion and pain written in every line of her. The slope of her shoulders as she sits, the curve of her spine, the hang of her head… Caleb is bad at reading people, usually, but this is plain enough even for him. She’s at her end. She has nothing more to give; he himself has precious little left.

Today, it was her collapsing. Tomorrow, he knows, in his bones, it will be them both.

“Will it stop?” she asks, voice low and shaking. There’s a tremor to her hands, a shadow of madness to her eyes, as she stares at Caleb. He’s hidden himself in the corner, but the glow of his gods-dammed manacles lights him up regardless. “If we– will it stop? Will they let us sleep?”

Caleb _stares_ at her.

“Caleb,” she snaps, and there’s a kind of mania to her voice. “Caleb, will they let us fucking _sleep_?”

“You can’t be serious,” he says, flatly – but he knows she is, can read the desperation in her eyes. “Beauregard– ”

“ _Caleb_ ,” she says again, as she shuffles over to him, crosses the metre or so between them on her knees. “Caleb, we can’t– we can’t take this. We can’t take another hit. I– that was. Close.” She sounds haunted, scared through her grim bravado, and he doesn’t blame her. He’s seen that kind of unconsciousness on the battlefield, the puppet-strings-cut collapse, and knows what it means. He’s scared too. “Too fucking close,” she says. Her hands find his knees, and he stiffens, every muscle in his body tensing. “…There’s gotta be something to save. When the others come. If we’re dead–”

He hates that she’s not wrong. Hates Eodwulf, for doing this to them. Hates Trent, for maybe ordering it, for definitely _condoning_ it.

Hates himself, for dragging her into this in the first place.

Beau pries at his knees, gently at first, and then more insistently when he resists. He drags his legs closer to his chest – but she’s stronger than he is, even sleepless and weakened. It’s easy enough for her to push them apart, to press herself into the space between them, despite the way he cringes from her. As though that would do _anything_ for him, her weight against his chest, her hips between his thighs. As though his skin is not crawling just as much as he’s sure hers is.

“Caleb,” says Beau, again, insistent, as terrified as he is. She doesn’t press any further, just stays there, hands fisted in the neck of his shirt. “Caleb, _there’s gotta be something left to save_.”

She’s right, and he hates it.

He’s not sure what the noise that comes out of his mouth is, a sob or a cry or something awful, broken, dead. He turns his face from her, presses his cheek against the wall and stares at the corner, because it’s all he can _do_. He can’t fight her. Not on this.

Beau lets go of him sharply, the madness sliding away as her hands fall to her sides. She doesn’t move off him, though – stays pressed between his legs, on her knees, chest-to-chest with him. “We’re gonna _die_ ,” she says, softly. When she touches him, this time, it’s careful fingers against his hair. “Caleb, we’re gonna fucking _die_ , if we don’t. Shit. _Shit_. I’m not– not gonna force you. But…”

“You are… right,” he manages, the words choked up from the bottom of his lungs. His breath comes in panicked, unsteady heaves. “But–” _But you are my sister. But you are not attracted to men. But this is horrific, and I do not want this._

Beau looks at him, her eyes into his, and he can see every word in his head inside hers. “Yeah,” she says, softly, still stroking his hair in an awful parody of intimacy, in the most comforting gesture he’s ever known. “Yeah. I know. But I don’t fucking want to die in this shitty little cell because of some asshole wizard, and I bet you don’t either. So we gotta work with what we’ve got. So. We gotta. Right?”

Caleb knows asking for permission, for absolution, when he sees it. Funny that she should feel the one responsible for that, in this situation. “Right,” he says, quietly, letting his eyes flutter closed. He can feel his throat working, feel each swallow like a fist in his esophagus. “ _Ja_ , you are… right.”

The silence between them hangs heavy, painful. Beau is still on his lap, her weight on his thighs, her hand on his hair. One of them is shaking, or perhaps both – he can feel it, where his chest is touching hers, and it brings a wave of nausea to his throat. They are terrified, both, before they have even begun, and he dreads to think how they will be by the end.

Ever practical, though, Caleb grits his teeth, forces his next words out. “We should… you, ah. We should get ourselves– ready,” he says, carefully. “If you mean to do this now, that is. I would– I will– I do not wish to, to touch you. Not more than I need to. So, if might be best if we… we– take care of ourselves.”

 _Ready_. _Take care._ The awful euphemisms sit bitter in his mouth before he spits them out.

“…Yeah,” says Beau, quietly, and the anxiety is so thick in her voice he can taste it. “Yeah. Okay.” She shifts off his lap, sliding backwards a half-meter or so until she can sit on cold, hard stone, her knees pressed to his. A moment later, he hears the shift of cloth, the faintest exhale of a breath.

When he forces himself to open his eyes, it is to the sight of Beau with a hand tucked down the front of her pants, fingers moving beneath the cloth. She’s hunched in on herself, as though the curve of her shoulders might hide her furtive motions. He averts his gaze, and out of the corner of his eye he sees her relax a little, collapse another inch in on herself.

He pulls himself from his pants, dutifully, without joy. Loosens the laces at the waist, and pushes the fabric down his hips far enough to tug his limp cock free. The urge to apologise is strong, for just the simple violation of exposing himself. Unlike her, he cannot simply slip a hand down his waistband to touch himself, hidden and subtle.

Beau is not watching him, he notices, as he spits self-consciously in his palm and begins the rough drag of skin over skin.

For a long moment, they are silent. Awkwardly so. The room is small, and they are sat close, knees almost pressed together, touching themselves intimately. The cuffs around Caleb’s wrists light the space between their bodies, unsteady and shifting with every pull of his hand over his limp cock.

“Have you,” he says, into the silence, and struggles for words, for a delicate way to put this. There is nothing delicate about their situation, but he desperately _wants_ there to be, wants something other than terrifying necessity between them. He will not bring more cruelty into this, not when there is already so much. “Have you… done this, before?”

“With a guy?” asks Beau, her eyebrow arched as though he is an idiot – which is fair, he thinks, all things considered.

He shakes his head. “Penetration,” he says, and the talking is _helping_ , the distraction from the grinding horror of their reality making things just a fraction easier. His cock begins to fill beneath his fingers, half-unwanted. He keeps his thoughts on someone else, _anyone_ else, a stranger in his mind’s eye, naked and enthusiastic and willing.

Everything Beauregard is not.

She pulls a face, her gaze carefully averted from his face and below his waist, staring at a point just over his shoulder. “Eh,” she says, and the casualness of that single syllable is belied by the tension in her shoulders. “Not really my thing.”

Caleb’s stomach sinks.

He has no particular prideful delusions about his own size, but a first time is never easy. Even when it is between two people who _want_ it, who are attracted to one another, who are relaxed and eager and willing. To do it here, desperate and miserable…

“Okay,” he says, softly, as her ears ratchet another inch up towards her ears. “That is– okay.” It’s not okay. Nothing about this is okay, and yet here he is – reassuring his best friend, as he struggles to get hard enough to rape her. “We will– we will be careful, then.”

“Have _you_ done this before?” asks Beau, and there’s something like curiosity in her voice, something close enough to banter that he can imagine they’re somewhere else. _Anywhere_ else, other than here. “Like, sex in general, I mean, not. _This_. I fucking _hope_ you haven’t done _this_ before.”

The illusion collapses, built and destroyed in an instant.

“Ah…” he manages, and he’s not sure _what_ it is that shows in his voice, but her expression– changes. Concern, he thinks, absently, or perhaps disgust. Not that it matters, either way. “Not. Not recently.” He thumbs over the head of his cock, tightens his fingers around the shaft of it until it nearly hurts, an old, bright pleasure shining through the pain. He’d thought he was past that particular perversion, that childish fascination with his own suffering. The way his cockhead leaks against his thumb, slick and sensitive, says otherwise. “Not since…”

His cock twitches at the memory of it, the last time he did this – _dark brown hair and a wicked smile and_ pain _, blood in his mouth, hands on his throat, body thrilling to the_ righteousness _of the hurting_ – and he thinks he might be sick, empty stomach or no.

Beau winces. “Shit,” she mutters, tired, _exhausted_. “Fuck. Sorry.” She pauses, swallows hard enough he can hear it. He can hear the noises of her fingers, too, where they dip inside her, little slick-wet sounds even through the cloth of her pants. “…You ready yet, or what.”

Caleb wishes he could say no. Wishes he could _keep_ saying no, forever and ever, until the rest of the Nein free them from this prison. “ _Ja_ ,” he says, instead, softly. He reaches for her, for the waistband of her pants to tug them down and for her hips to guide her forward.

When she flinches from him, he flinches too, pressing his back against the stone wall and his palms against the floor. “I– sorry,” he says, “sorry, _sorry_ –” There’s a note of helplessness to his voice, a note of desperation – because she can flinch all she likes, and he can apologise all he likes, but this still has to happen, or they die. His sorries won’t change a thing.

“Can you–” Beau’s face shutters, her eyes squeezing closed as though in pain. Her fingers still find the fabric of her pants, though. She hooks thumbs into the waist, nudges them down an inch, hands shaking. “Just. Your, uh, fingers, first. Maybe?”

Caleb has seen her look like a wild animal before, many times – but never like one with its leg caught in a hunter’s trap.

“ _Ja_ ,” he says, softly. He curls one hand back around his cock, fingers in a tight circle around the base of it for fear of getting soft. “I will have to, to touch myself, also. Whilst I touch you.”

“Whatever,” she says, with a shrug, like it doesn’t matter. Caleb wishes he believed her.

There is no point arguing, though. They have made their decision, and now they have to live with it. When he reaches between her legs, the cuffs around his wrist lights the darkness between her thighs. The blue-green glow against the brown of her skin looks sickly. He grits his teeth, fingers tightening around his cock, and looks away.

He slides fingers into her by touch alone. One at first, and then a second when he is certain it will not hurt her. He can feel the tension in her by the unyielding press of her thighs against his hand, the staccato shortness of her breathing.

It takes a few moments longer to find her clit, years out of practice and fumbling, but he manages. His fingers slip in and out of her in slow, short strokes, and he presses the pad of his thumb up against her. Coordinating well enough to rub in slow, careful circles is a challenge, but he manages – and the faint gratification he feels when her hips twitch against his hand is enough to turn his stomach. He grits his teeth, tightens the grip of fingers around his cock, and forces himself to continue.

“ _Jester_ ,” breathes Beau, her eyes closed. The name seems involuntary, barely murmured but still loud in the echoing silence of the cell.

Caleb’s fingers still, and he huffs out a noise that in any other circumstance might have been a laugh. “Ah,” he says, quietly, lips twitching in a half-hearted attempt at a smile. “I should have guessed.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she snaps, sharp and angry and _scared_. She doesn’t open her eyes, but she must feel him flinch nonetheless. They’re pressed together, her belly to his chest, connected intimately where his fingers sink inside her. There’s no movement, no reaction, that they can keep private from one another.

When he starts moving his fingers again, crooking them gently inside her, he’s slower. More hesitant.

Beau doesn’t apologise for the outburst, and he doesn’t expect her to, not during this. But her hand finds his head, after a moment, resting lightly against the curve of his skull. He leans into the touch, just a little, and stays silent.

If she makes a noise above him, a hitch of breath, a sob, Jester’s name again– he doesn’t mention it. It is the least he can do for her, in this.

Gradually, gradually, the movement of his fingers inside her becomes easier. The barely-wet drag of them turns into a slick slide as she opens around him. Some of the panic-knot tangled in Caleb’s chest eases, just a little. This will be better if she is wet and open, even if the arousal is a biological artefact and nothing more.

He parts his fingers inside her, a fraction, encourages her to relax further. His fingertips hunt for the places inside her that feel best, unsure whether attempting to bring her pleasure makes what he is doing better or worse. Still, he circles his thumb faster and firmer around her clit, feels the wet of her run down his wrist.

When he curls his fingers, this time, she gasps unsteadily above him. Her hips hitch towards his touch, bumping his chest, and a shattered sort of noise dredges itself up from somewhere deep in her gut.

“Beauregard,” Caleb says, quietly, suddenly afraid.

Her cunt clenches abruptly, hot and tight around his fingers, her orgasm rolling through her in shuddering waves and and– “ _Stop_ ,” she grits out, like he’s stabbed her, like she’s _dying_. She grabs his wrist, and he pulls away from her as though burned. “Stop, _stop_ –” She pushes away from him, crawls the full few meters away she can manage and _retches_. They’ve been fed little since being thrown into the cell, and nothing comes up but saliva, a little acid. She shudders and gasps, though, as if she were trying to vomit up her own stomach.

Caleb swallows down a sudden rush of nausea of his own. “ _Beauregard_ ,” he says, helplessly, furious with himself that he can find no other words. “I’m–”

“Shut the _fuck_ up,” she rasps, raw and feral, and there’s a desperation to her voice that shuts his mouth as surely as any spell. “Just– let’s get this over with. _Done_. I’m– I’m–” She gags again, a wet and awful noise. Caleb, his cock still hard in the circle of his fingers, has never been less aroused. “I’m fine.”

She crawls back over to him, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand, and he wants to recoil from the rage in her eyes and the wet on her cheeks and the acrid smell of bile on her chin. He clenches his jaw, instead, and does not look at her as she straddles his hips. As she grasps his cock. As she flinches at the way it twitches, blood-hot beneath the touch of her calloused fingers.

He, cruelly, does not look as she mounts him, eyes squeezed shut against the indignity of their shared violation. That, he leaves her to suffer alone, hiding away in the blessed darkness of his own head.

The act of it is– perfunctory. Joyless and miserable. Caleb isn’t sure he can find the words to do the horror of it justice. The mechanics are enough to keep him aroused, the heat and tightness and wetness of her around him _good_ despite the rest making him sick to his stomach. She rides him, unskilled, unsteady with exhaustion and deprivation and loathing, and he helps her as much as she will tolerate – hands on her waist, over the cloth of her shirt, to help steady and guide her, to take the weight off her thighs a little. Nothing more.

When he reaches for her clit again, she catches his forearm in a grip of iron.

When he doesn’t pull away, her thumb finds a point just above the cuffs, and digs a nail into the space between two tendons hard enough to make his eyes water. He groans, prays she mistakes the noise for pain rather than– whatever it truly is, a complicated twist of loathsome sense-memory arousal. The kickback nausea of guilt follows a moment after, a clawing sickness that he is finding even the slightest, most fucked-up piece of pleasure in this.

He worries he might soften there and then, wet heat around him be damned, nail in his wrist be damned. But her free hand dips between her legs, her own fingers on her clit instead of his, and the first clench of her around him has his hips twitching up into her, involuntary and unbidden.

“Don’t touch me,” says Beau, lowly, releasing his hand. He can hear the noise of her fingers, slick between her legs, can hear the note of agony in her voice even louder than that. Her pain is deafening, silent, expanding until the resonant horror of it fills every inch of their hell. “Just– don’t.”

Caleb nods, and closes his eyes. “ _Ja_ ,” he says, breathless, dizzy, pressing one cuff down against the hard stone floor until the edge bites into his skin. It’s not as good as her nail, but it’s _something_. Behind his eyelids, Astrid smiles at him as she sinks down onto his cock, teeth and eyes gleaming like a predator in the dark. “ _Ja_ , okay. Sorry.”

He’s not sure Beau hears him. Not sure it matters, with the way her thighs are shaking with every rise and fall. The wet of her drips slick down his cock, over his balls. The speed of her fingers is almost frantic.

“ _Jes’_ ,” she whispers, and Caleb realises her breathing’s running ragged, her rhythm’s off. She clenches around him, and he fucks up into her on instinct, unable to help it. It drives a cry from her and, far gone as they are, he can’t tell whether it’s one of pleasure or pain.

He presses the cuff against stone, again. This time, it breaks the skin, hot blood spilling under it and dripping off his fingers. His cock stays hard, aching with the brightness of the pain.

Above him, Beau’s breathing hitches, stutters. One of her hands grabs his shirt, braces against his shoulder, the fingers on her clit working quick and clever circles–

He had thought it would be hard, coming. Near impossible, when no part of this is arousing to him. But the first orgasm-clench of Beau around him lights a fire in his belly, physiology above psychology, and abruptly he _needs_. No matter the circumstance, no matter how much he will hate himself for it – the arousal punches into him, a blow to the gut, and he is abruptly rocking up into her with a desperate sort of madness.

“C’mon,” she mutters from above him, still riding him. He registers, distantly, that she’s shaking again. “C’mon, hurry up, _c’mon_.”

The woman behind his eyes tosses her head, arches her back, her chest heaving as she sits astride him, clenches around him, urges him on. “A-” he starts, panting, and bites the name off with a long, low groan. His balls draw up tight, and he _trembles_ , and has just enough presence of mind to press at Beau’s hip, urge her off him–

He slips free of her just before he comes, a stripe of white across the hard plane of her stomach. It feels– _obscene_ , somehow, moreso than anything else they’ve just done together, but he still groans with the _relief_ of it. It has been a long time. A long, long time.

Dark brown hair and a wicked smile mock him, from somewhere behind his eyes.

Beau’s moving mere seconds after he finishes, wiping his come from her with a torn piece of sleeve she discards in the corner, pulling her pants back on. “…Hope you enjoyed that, you fucking _creeps_!” she yells at the ceiling, as though their captors are watching. “Probably not much as I’m gonna enjoy ripping your spines out through your miserable fucking _throats_ , but cool! Whatever!”

With a jolt, Caleb realises she could be right. Astrid and Eodwulf and Trent are more than capable of a simple scry. But it changes nothing, though, whether they were watching or not. He tucks himself back into his trousers, and presses himself deeper into his corner. Thighs to his chest, arms around his shins, forehead to his knees. It’s safe, the darkness in the hollow of his body, the only point of comfort he’s managed to find in the whole of the past ten days.

He lets Beau shout and curse at the ceiling, for all the good it will do her, until her voice starts to crack.

When she starts sobbing, more than shouting, he lifts his head from her knees. She’s tucked herself into the corner opposite, knees drawn up to her chest, fingers clutched white-knuckled around her shins. Her eyes are red. Caleb does her the decency of pretending he doesn’t see the tear-tracks down her cheeks.

“Are…” he starts, and stops when he realises any words he could offer would be frankly pathetic in the face of the last few minutes. “Beauregard,” he settles on, quiet and lost.

“Fuck you,” she rasps, and he flinches. There’s a ringing in his ears, the sense of the world pulling away from him. He fights it. He owes it to her to be here, to be present. To not hide away from this inside his own brain. “Fuck you, _fuck you_ , fuck off, and fuck _them_ , and– and fuck _me_ , for, for– fuck, what was I even– I’m gonna _kill_ them, rip the fucker’s head off, I’m gonna–”

She’s breathing too fast, chest heaving against her thighs. “Try– to breathe slower,” says Caleb, softly, helplessly. His hands are shaking, though he barely notices. The urge to dissociate is a more immediate concern, pressing insistently against his skull like the vice-grip beginnings of a migraine. “You will panic, otherwise. Slow breaths.”

“ _Fuck you_ ,” snarls Beau, bares her teeth, closes her eyes – but she sucks in a desperate breath, holds it, lets it out in a exhale that’s more a sob than anything else. “I’m gonna _kill_ – fuck. _Fuck_.” She sucks in another breath, and another, holds each of them trembling in her chest. She sounds like she’s dying.

“In and out,” says Caleb, slowly. The pressure behind his forehead is acute, an exhausted, stressed throbbing that hammers at his skull. He wants to vomit, but there’s nothing in his stomach. He wants to _sleep_ , but is dreading the nightmares that will inevitably come. “In and out.”

Gradually, gradually, her breathing slows, steadies. Her shoulders still shake, but her inhales are measured, careful, rather than gasping heaves. Caleb exhales, quietly, when her eyes open. “There,” he says, little more than a whisper. “That is better.”

“…You’re bleeding,” she says, in response, her voice as carefully flat as her expression. Her eyes are locked on one faintly glowing wrist, carefully avoiding his face, his body.

Caleb glances down. There’s blood smeared and dried crumbling up his forearm, over the sharp lip of the cuff, a small spatter of it across the stone by one thigh. “Mm,” he agrees. The wound pulses in time to his heartbeat, now he’s focused on it, a long and shallow slice lengthways across the sensitive skin of his wrist. “I was. Not any more.”

She doesn’t press further, and he offers no more words on the subject. The silence hangs heavy between them.

“I… shouldn’t’ve told you to fuck off,” she says, eventually, her eyes still on his wrist, the bright red of it against his paler skin. “Sorry. I guess. Not your fault, that we…”

The muscles in his throat tighten, all at once, choking him. “You– have nothing to apologise for,” he says, soft and tight, when he can breathe through the constriction once more. There’s a stone in his lungs, a sword through his neck. “ _Nothing_. I am– _I_ am sorry. For. For…”

“Don’t,” says Beau, and “Just… _don’t._ ” She sounds tired. More than tired, exhausted, in the same bone-deep and weeping way that he is. There are no rules for navigating this, for either of them. No scripts, no guides. Every word out their lips is a violence, grinding knives deeper into soft and wounded insides.

“…We should sleep,” says Caleb, eventually, because it needs to be said. Because Beau is still staring at the blood on his arm, in a way he does not like. “If they will let us.” If they don’t… he’s not sure what he will do. Not sure what _Beauregard_ will do. “It will not– it. Sleep will help.”

“Yeah,” says Beau, again, rubbing her palms against her legs, stiff and jerky. “Yeah, you’re right.”

The weight of what has happened between them looms large, and Caleb hesitates. His instinct is to hold a hand out to her, but the thought twists his stomach into knots. He has hurt her. No matter how necessary, no matter that she _agreed_ , he has hurt her. Badly. The thought of reaching out to her, after that…

But the thought of letting Eodwulf, of letting _Trent_ , get hooks into this – his new life, his new friends, his new _family_ – repulses him even more deeply. He cannot let them take this from him. He _will_ not let them take this from him.

“Come here,” he says to her, eventually. As though it were something easy. As though it were something un-loaded, something casual – as though inviting her to lean on him, sleep next to him, still meant as little as it used to when they camped out beneath the stars. “I am– ah, bony, perhaps, but still more comfortable than the floor.”

“…Caleb,” says Beau, hard and wary. His name sounds like a warning, and the sharpness of it catches him between the ribs more keenly than any dagger ever has.

“Beauregard,” he echoes, the ghost of something that, in another world, could have been humour in his voice. He moves his fingers, the tiniest of beckons, and swallows hard through the knife in his chest. When she does not move, he sighs, shoulders slumping. “ _Beauregard_. It is– as you said. There has to be something left to save.”

It is not enough, for them to be alive, when the Nein come – because they _will_ come, Caleb must believe that, or else there is no reason to not open his wrists on the sharp edges of his cuffs, to bleed out here across the stone. There must be something of them to save, not just _them_ in the individual, but the collective too. They cannot let Eodwulf, with his spells and his grand, inventive cruelties, destroy that. Destroy _them_.

There must be _something_ , not just _someone_ , left to save.

Beau looks unsteady, as half-wild as she had been after the curse had knocked her to the floor. But she shifts, nonetheless, from her corner, shuffling across the room towards him. He’s barely breathing as she settles herself, tentative and tense, into the half-circle of his arm. Her ribs press against his, the rise and fall of them rabbit-fasting and unsteady. He has no doubt she can feel the way he’s trembling, in turn.

When she rests her head on his shoulder, as they’ve done so many times before, it feels like benediction.

* * *

They sleep for eight hours, or thereabouts. Caleb’s uncanny sense of time has been distorted, here, with pain and exhaustion and the inability to see sky. When they wake, there is food, and they fall upon it as though starving, and they do not talk about what they have done. What they have been forced to do. What they are – though it turns Caleb’s stomach to acknowledge it as such – being _rewarded_ for.

* * *

An hour later, Eodwulf returns, with a fresh geas sparking at his fingertips and satisfied sort of smirk on his face.

Beau goes for his throat, with elbows and teeth and a scream of incalculable pain, a wild animal just barely free of the snare and sick with terror at the thought of going back in. Caleb just watches, slumped in his corner and trembling faintly, unable to move. Unable to think, barely able to even breathe. Not again. _Not again._

Hold Person tightens its claws around Beau, and Caleb thinks – dissociative, absent, floating somewhere a foot above his numb and shaking body – about pressing cuffs against stone until he severs an artery. Surely, if he died, it would give Beau some reprive. Surely, they would not make her– but they _might_ , and the thought of that alone is enough to stop him.

Beau, tears on her cheeks and teeth bared and body still, screams and screams and _screams._

Eodwulf presses fingers to her temples, and her nose starts bleeding. The wound on Caleb’s wrist throbs in time to his heartbeat, a constant temptation. He thinks of Eodwulf, instead, dead on the floor of their cell with empty eyes and a caved-in skull. He thinks of his own blood, dark and wet and spreading slowly across stone. He thinks of Beau, ragdoll limp and bleeding from her nose, her chest still.

And – as Eodwulf drops Beau to the floor, turns towards him, still smiling like a wolf – he thinks of Astrid, sat astride him, all teeth and eyes in the dark, and laughing, laughing, _laughing._

**Author's Note:**

> In DnD terms, Eodwulf cast [Geas](https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/geas) on them both, with the command being something along the lines of “have sex with one another”. Geas lasts for 30 days at 5th level, but since it seems to be a command, I figured having sex once would satisfy the the letter of the spell, since Eodwulf didn’t add “every day” or anything – hence the need to recast. I still fudged the rules for Geas a little, though; technically, Geas also applies a charm effect towards the caster, but given the nature of what Eodwulf was asking them to do I figured the advantage on persuasion from the charm effect would be balanced out by the disadvantage from Beau and Caleb’s general attitude of “go fuck yourself”.
> 
> Also, an Easter egg, for people who like mechanics: Beauregard was unconscious for thirty seconds, which amounts to five rounds. With one death saving throw per round, and with her waking up after passing three saves, that means she failed two. :) Last one could have gone either way...
> 
> Come find me @ sparxwrites on tumblr, for stuff that is usually _slightly_ less morally reprehensible than this.


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